Introduction: Scottish society in perspective.

Scotland before 1750 was a small and rather poor country whose significance for European political, economic and, to a lesser extent, intellectual life was at best peripheral. Her economy and society were transformed in the century after 1750 by agrarian and industrial changes which catapulted Scotland to prominence in world affairs, a standing that the early modern period had barely presaged. Until the advent of a largely urbanised and industrialised society in the nineteenth century, historians have tended to assume that the social structure of Scotland retained archaic forms which had long disappeared from more ‘developed’ countries such as England. Scotland's economy and level of wealth in the pre-industrial period have often seemed closest to those of Scandinavian countries or Ireland. Not only was Scotland peripheral to mainstream European history, but her society was so distinctive as to be of little relevance to an understanding of social organisation and change in a wider context. This introductory chapter sets out to question these preconceptions by analysing Scottish society between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution in a European context and, by presenting a brief and accessible outline of social structures and trends, to assess the typicality or distinctiveness of Scotland. In this task, the social historian is constrained by the comparative lack of academic research on pre-nineteenth-century Scottish society. Some aspects of Scottish social history have always been attractive to the Scots themselves, but the society of Scotland in the past has received remarkably little attention from scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]